Thursday

Weather Channel asks:
Won't you stick around?

Expanding programming beyond quickie forecast

By Heidi Vogt

   How long does it take to watch a weather forecast? Five minutes? Ten minutes?
   Not long enough, or so The Weather Channel has decided. The cable network known for reminding you to take your umbrella to work is in the middle of a massive programming shift with the goal of getting viewers to stay tuned longer than a few sips of coffee.
   Reality television has become a key element in every other network's programming, so why not The Weather Channel?
   Among other changes, the network recently debuted “Storm Stories,” a half-hour reality show about people’s extraordinary encounters with severe weather. The show airs two back-to-back episodes Monday through Friday from 8 p.m. to 9 p.m.
   A week into the new show, it seems to be finding an audience. Since its premiere on Jan. 6, “Storm Stories” has averaged a household rating of 0.4, up from the 0.3 rating the network has had in that time slot for the past decade. The highest-rated “Storm Stories” installment, last Thursday’s episode entitled “Avalanche,” had a 0.5 household rating.
   For comparison's sake, during November '02, The Weather Channel averaged a .2 primetime household rating.
   Nielsen ratings weight highly the amount of time that people stay tuned to a certain channel, so a network that can keep viewers’ attention for a half hour or an hour tends to garner higher ratings than a channel that people only watch for a few minutes at a time.
    “We wanted to develop a signature show that could form the base of our viewership Monday through Friday,” says Terry Connelly, senior vice president of programming and production for The Weather Channel.
   Historically, primetime is one of the network’s least-watched dayparts. People tend to turn on The Weather Channel in the morning, check the weather for the day, and then quickly turn off.
   However, the network did improve its delivery among the 18-34, 18-49 and 25-54 demographics in primetime during November, averaging a nearly 10 percent bump.
   “That morning viewer wants ‘give me my weather and get me out the door’ in the morning,” says Connelly. “But when they come home in the evening they want to relax. Then they really want knowledge.”
   This knowledge-seeker is the target of the network’s new approach, which Connelly notes tends to be pretty upscale and thereby more desirable to advertisers.
   “These people are tired of the sitcoms and reality TV that’s on broadcast TV. They’re looking for more information and reality-type programming, but they want true stories, not sensationalized stories,” says Connelly.
   The challenge, as Connelly acknowledges, is that the new twist in programming now puts The Weather Channel in competition with the likes of The Discovery Channel, TLC and A&E. The Weather Channel finished well behind all three in every demographic in November, both in primetime and total-day.
   But Connelly argues that his network has a huge advantage -- the legions who surf with their remotes to check out the channel for forecast updates. Once there, they can be hooked by the new programming to stay a little longer, and ideally a lot longer, if it works.
   "Storm Stories" is part of a revamping of the network that's been going on since 2000, when it began segmenting its format into dayparts, each with a different host, in place of a headline-news format.
   “Storm Stories” is the outgrowth of the network’s first attempt at longer-form programming, a newsmagazine entitled “Atmospheres” that has been since canceled because it failed to improved ratings consistently.
   “The magazine format gave viewers an opportunity to tune out,” says Connelly. So rather than show a number of different stories in each episode of “Storm Stories,” The Weather Channel has decided to focus on one individual in each episode.
    Another new show, “Forecast Earth,” is slated to premiere next October. This documentary-style show will focus on aspects of climate change. Topics include El Nino, coastal storms and the science of forecasting.
   “Forecast Earth” will air as infrequent specials on weekends, replacing reruns of “Atmosphere.”
   “We’re not an environment channel,” insists Connelly, “But there are some more serious issues in our domain, and those are climate issues.”
    But these changes all carry risks for The Weather Channel, and the chief one is that it could quickly lose viewers who tune into the network for the latest weather update and find documentary-style programming.
   Those viewers will simply continue clicking.
   How do you offer feature programming and still appeal to forecast seekers?
    The answer, says Connelly, is a scroll of breaking weather running along the bottom of the screen and program interruptions for large storm reports.
   But that be enough? Is The Weather Channel's identity so tied to the quick forecast that viewers will not accept anything else?
   That its first effort at feature content, "Atmospheres," failed is not a good sign. It is the challenge of these new shows to prove that viewers really are interested in the weather beyond the quick forecast.

-Heidi Vogt is a staff writer for Media Life.

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